No, this is not breaking news, (despite my choice of illustration), but it IS fascinating. And if you missed it (as I would suppose many of you did, as I certainly did) last month, you might be willing to pick up on the matter now. https://www.rcfp.org/briefs-comments/commonwealth-of-virginia-v-sawye/ The Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, has had the state take an appeal from a trial court order that ordered the disclosure of certain records relating to an emailed tip line. What I've linked you to above is an amicus brief from the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press. The underlying lawsuit was brought by American Oversight by the law firm Ballard Spahr. It concerns the issue of how state FOIA's ought to be interpreted. "As broadly as the language will bear" would seem a reasonable answer to that question: would it not? If you believe so, then you should want the trial court decision in this matter upheld. A little background -- the "tip...
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I had high hopes for Glenn Youngkin as long ago as ... well, his victory in the primary election against the other (more Trumpian) Republicans in the field. He, like Mitt Romney before him, comes from the world of private equity, and the masterminds of that world are much-maligned, their work does have a disruptive effect that draws enmity. But they do much more good than harm -- amidst those disruptions there is a lot of productive innovation and the displacement of settled inefficiencies. Like Romney's Bain, Youngkin's Carlyle is the object of lurid stories about how it throws people out of work. There is some truth to it. And I feel sympathy, drawn from personal experience, for anyone who has been laid off. During the 2012 campaign, Romney made himself seem utterly unsympathetic toward those experiencing the downside of Bain-stoked disruption. He notoriously said "I like being able to fire people." He was trying to make a point about healthcare policy but this, com...
Terry McAuliffe won the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor earlier this month, setting up an autumnal show-down with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin. There was no suspense in the Dem primary, McAuliffe won with 62% of the vote, and the second-place finisher got only 19% . Nobody was biting nails. McAuliffe is an old-school political hack, who guaranteed the loan that the Clinton's used to buy their nice new house in Westchester County (pictured above) when they were ready to move out of their leased Pennsylvania Avenue place in DC. He almost immediately thereafter became the head of the DNC and is credited with valuable modernization of the fund-raising machinery there. He also had a big part in running HRC's campaign in 2012. His opponent, Youngkin, is a former CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private-equity management firms in the world. He played a big part in Carlyle's transformation from a partnership into a publicly traded ...
"Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) on Monday began his new job as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a controversial appointment that could set up a showdown between the White House and Senate Republicans." I saw that recently and wondered at the name. It looked a bit familiar Cuccinelli is Madonna's birth name? [Note -- no, that turns out to be Ciccone.] Cuccinelli made a bit of a splash when he was state Attorney General for Virginia in the period 2010-14 under Governor Bob McDonnell. In that capacity, he investigated climate scientists, stating that they were arguably engaged in fraud by peddling this notion that CO2 emissions affect the planet in ways that might prove harmful to humans. I am happy to note that, at the very least, he did not misuse his position to bring any charges. My guess is that announcing an investigation was sufficient to get him what he wanted from it -- a blast of narcissistical...
Let me put this together to see if I understand. On February 1, 2019, the Virginian Pilot brought to light a yearbook photo from the Eastern Virginia Medical School class of which Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam (D) is an alumnus. The photo, on his yearbook page, showed two young men, one in minstrel show style blackface and the other wearing a KKK hood. Northam's immediate response was to admit that he was one of the two young men pictured. It was not immediately clear which one, but he was clear that he was one of them. "I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo," he said. That wording doesn't leave a lot of room for misconstrual. There were only two persons who appeared in that photo. Thus only two people made the relevant "decision," and Northam was saying he was one of them. He doesn't say which one, but that mattered little given how offensive either of them was. In the hours that followed, a numb...
That phrase comes, of course, from the Declaration of Independence. It is the third of the unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. The word "property" often shows up as the third item on such lists, and does so for example in both the Bill of Rights and the 14th amendment. But Jefferson wrote of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Much heavy water has been made of this in the last 2 and 1/3 centuries. I'm reminded of an episode of The Sopranos in which Tony is complaining to his psychologist about his terrible life. He says that he saw a documentary on The History Channel in which the anchor said that the US is the only nation in the world with a founding document that explicitly mentions happiness. "So where is my happiness," he cries. Dr. Melfi, "'Pursuit' is what it says." Tony: "Yeah, there's always a fucking loophole." Anyway, one common question is the origin of Jefferson's p...
On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed. Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs." The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebellum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan. Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp. Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others. On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I n...
On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed. Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs." The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebellum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan. Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp. Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others. On a trip through Virginia a few years ago,...